A guide on palicoes in Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. Included are their uses, growth, equipment, and behavior in battle.

What are Palicoes?

Palicoes are feline comrades that accompany hunters on quests. They assist hunters in a variety of ways, like picking up items, befriending grimalkynes, and setting up traps to using gadgets in and out of combat. Like hunters, palicoes can also be outfitted with weapons and armor with elemental attributes.

You will be partnered with one palico at the start of the story. Decide on its name and appearance carefully, as you will not be able to change it later. Note that there is currently no way to bring multiple palicoes into quests.

Growth

Palicoes level up as you take them on quests. This grants them more attack power and defense. When left on standby at home, your palico will train by itself. It will still gain levels this way, though at a slower pace. A palico’s level caps at 50.

Equipment

Armor and Weapons

You can equip your palico with armor and weapons forged at the smithy. As with hunter gear, palico equipment require monster materials to make. The crafting cost, however, is paid with research points rather than money.

Palico armor sets consist of a piece of headgear and body armor. While armor does not grant your palico any skills, it can give elemental resistances for fighting different monsters.

Palico weapons are used to inflict elemental damage and status ailments. They are separated into two damage types as well: severing and blunt.

Gadgets

Palicoes have access to special gadgets that have a variety of uses. These can do things like provide healing, steal items from monsters, or throw explosives.

Each gadget has two stages of use. At first, your palico will use these two actions on its own. Through constant use of a gadget, your Palico will gain proficiency levels, allowing it to use actions on command. Your Palico can be told to use stage 1 and 2 actions at proficiency levels 5 and 10. Gadget proficiency level caps at 15.

Gadgets are obtained by completing Grimalkyne sidequests found around the different maps.

Combat

Palicoes primarily assist you in combat by drawing a monster’s attention. You can then attack monsters without much risk of a direct counterattack. Since palico weapons can do either severing or blunt damage, they are capable of helping you cut off or break monster parts.